National Central Library of Florence

• 7,000,000 printed volumes
• 160,000 periodicals, including 15,178 currently published
• 4,000 incunabula, 25,000 manuscripts, 29,120 editions from the 16th century, 2,696,327 pamphlets, and over 1,000,000 autographs.
• Since 2000, following a major acquisition by MiBACT, the library’s holdings have expanded to include one of the world’s most important collections of over 4,300 art editions and artist’s books from the Tuscan collector Loriano Bertini.
  It preserves approximately 12 terabytes of born-digital or digitized resources.

The library’s shelving covers 135 kilometers in total, increasing by over 1.5 kilometers annually.

This extraordinary collection makes the BNCF one of Italy’s foremost libraries and the only one capable of documenting the full breadth of the nation’s cultural history.

Originally housed in the Uffizi complex, the library moved to its current premises in 1935. The building, designed by Cesare Bazzani in 1911 and later expanded by Vincenzo Mazzei, is a rare example of library architecture and forms part of the Santa Croce monumental area.

• Since 1886, it has produced the Italian National Bibliography (BNI) and serves as the national bibliographic agency, overseeing access to bibliographic information (authors, titles, subjects, numbers, and classification headings).
• The BNI is published in six distinct series (Monographs, Printed Music, Periodicals, School Books, Children’s Books, Doctoral Theses), available in print, on DVD, or via the Italian National Library Service (SBN) network, working closely with the Central Institute for the Union Catalog of Italian Libraries and for Bibliographic Information (ICCU).
• It acts as a research institute in library science and digital innovation, particularly through the development and testing of standards for the preservation and accessibility of digital formats.
• The library developed the “Nuovo Soggettario,” a new subject indexing tool replacing the previous version from 1956. Since May 2013, Wikipedia offers in its External Links section a direct link to the Nuovo Soggettario Thesaurus.
  It has produced both the full and abridged Italian editions of the Dewey Decimal Classification, and now manages the online tool, Web Dewey.
• The library experiments with the long-term collection, selection, and preservation of digital documents, including those published online. Initiated in 2006 with the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, the National Central Library of Rome, and the Marciana Library of Venice, the Magazzini Digitali project has developed a system for the permanent preservation of electronic documents published in Italy and distributed via computer networks, in line with legal deposit rules (L. 106/2004, D.P.R. 252/2006).